Times are always uncertain and change is inevitable. As a company that’s been around for over two decades, one thing we’ve learned is “adapt or die.” In fact, Mojo Helpdesk was born out of the need to adapt.
As a technology company, we needed a way to handle both employee and customer requests, organize and prioritize tasks, and track task status. This work falls within the realm of ticket tracking systems (TTS). Even 10 years ago, there was a profusion of existing TTS solutions. Some free and open source. Others proprietary and expensive. Every one of them was complicated and required special training to set up and use. We couldn’t afford to get bogged down. So we created our own software, known as Mojo Helpdesk.
Fast forward a decade, and there are even more ticket management systems on the market today. Why? Because a ticket management system, the heart of any help or service desk, has become as essential to an organization as the internet. Every company now must manage a never ceasing number of requests.
As a result, every company needs to be able to efficiently manage, track internal work, improve response time, and serve customers. A ticket management system provides the best way to do this. As such, a TTS has come to play a critical part in enabling the agile organization.
Paradigm Shift to Customer Self-Service
What lies ahead? We can get a glimpse of the very near future by looking at something from the past. On June 10, 1964, John Roscoe flipped the switch to activate the first self-service gas pumps in the United States, changing how we pump gas forever and putting full service gas stations on notice. Today we’re already seeing customers who don’t want to call or email for help. They want to solve their problems NOW! They want to pump their own gas.
This is why we, and others in the space, have incorporated knowledge bases into our ticket management systems. A ticket management system with a knowledge base enables a company to create and share Frequently Asked Questions with users (customers, employees/staff, suppliers, etc.) and measure what answers perform the best. Then you can update the information in the knowledge base as needed so people always find good quality answers and don’t need to open a ticket.
Watch for Increased Integration to Enable More Agility
We can gain further insight into the future of the TTS by circling back to its primary purpose, which is to manage and track the status of various requests. Requests can be pretty much anything from anyone. These requests often trigger the launch of a process or potentially a series of processes.
To illustrate, when a customer reports a problem with a product, that might initiate the need for a product change for which there is a very specific process associated with product management. Addressing these requests, may require a very specific set of steps that become integrated into the workflow system. For example, an employee’s request for a new software triggers a variety of purchasing and technology processes. This aspect requires different functionalities that most TTS’ don’t have built-in. Yet the process is an important ingredient to support agility.
Hence expect to see ticket management systems become more closely integrated with many productivity software applications. Especially in the domain of project and process management. As Charles Darwin so perfectly put it: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Just as we all shift and adapt to the ongoing changes we face constantly, make sure you invest in tools that adapt and integrate with what you need for your workflow.